He did not miss the dark woods
inhabited by wild boars he had gotten to know in his youth on Sunday
excursions, where the greatest joy and the greatest daring came from grazing
the knees of one of the girls in his class with the excuse that the car was very
small, but for the desolate countryside that, now that his country was content
to forget everything with a guilty shrug of the shoulders that had always
seemed to him like a gob of spit in the face, his own and that of his father
and of all those who had died during the bombings, belonged only to him, enriching
a personal topography that corresponded in no way to the maps you could find in
Germany, given that, for him, the country called Germany had ended, had
disappeared from the face of the earth like an umbrella torn from the hands
during a storm that spins and flips a few times in the air before disappearing
into the dense, solid, uninterrupted wall of water that momentarily unites the
sky and the earth on the day the war had ended, or, better still, the day the
Nazis rose to power and what had been Germany for his father and for his
father’s father, the idea that justified the existence of a country between the
distant borders traversing the Russian plains and cutting off the valleys of
France, had been converted into something else, into a country where only
stupidity and hate prospered. That personal countryside, although profoundly
desolate and also modest when compared to that of others he had known who had
survived the war, bleeding from their feet on the lines of the eastern front or
rummaging through the pockets of the dead on the French front, was, in a way, a
trifle not even worth mentioning, but it was nevertheless the scene of the one
event of the war that really mattered to him, so many years later and so far
away. It was, like the memory of old men, he told me, a whim, but a whim that
justified everything.

The
one scene in this personal topography was a street in Dresden. In the middle of
a bombing, during the interminable hours of explosions and crying and
screaming, hours that the Germans would later completely forget, as if the
rubble they used to rebuild their houses and the tobacco they put in their
cigarettes belonged to a remote past, came from a time before they arrived at
that world they intended to repair, he peeked out of the basement window, where
he found himself only to witness this: a dog was howling in the middle of the
street and a soldier approached until he was nearly by its side and then, as if
in a different scene, a scene superimposed by a lazy editor, emptied the clip
of his pistol into the dog. And yet the dog did not die. It continued to moan
and shake, lying in the puddle that was forming of its own blood, alone in the
middle of the street where rubble from the buildings was falling without touching
it, and he, who, even though he was a child, wanted to end the animal’s
suffering, wanted to approach it, but a neighbour stopped him by grabbing him
by the belt so he would not go out into the street and become another victim of
that senseless war, so he had to stand there watching it, attending the agony
of the animal, which had stopped moaning but was still shaking, his bulging
eyes dancing around in their white sockets, until the bombing was over and the
dog stopped moving.

Much
later he asked himself, as had so many others, why Dresden? He tried to explain
it to himself to no avail why it had been his city that had been hit hardest by
the bombs, an unimportant commercial city the Nazis had left months earlier or,
although this was an idea he could rarely admit to himself, one where everyone
was a Nazi, in which case the thing to do would not be to bomb the city, but to
exterminate its residents one after the other, without allowing chance to save
a single one. Given that what they
called a vocation is often a resignation to a familiar mandate, he liked to
say, he told me under the brutal sun, almost as if in defiance of
circumstances, that he had not had a vocation, other than his ironclad
determination to leave Dresden to study veterinary medicine in Munich—in
Munich, because it represented everything that Germany had been for his father
and his father’s father, everything it now could never be, although he did not
have this conviction during his carefree days as a student, when the excursions
to see the wild boars and the grazing of a classmate’s knees in the car were
palliative enough for what he seemed to have left behind, for the years of the
war.

Although
the story could be told in other ways, in its entirety, for example, he
preferred the conclusion. He had worked for years in the Munich zoo, performing
the stupid bureaucratic tasks he was assigned with a resignation similar to
that with which he had accepted everything that had happened previously, the
successive governments, the problems on the other side of the wall, the
political alliances in that country that was neither his nor his father’s nor
his father’s father’s or anyone’s, until someone had told him about the Foundation’s
lots in Argentina, and he got the impression, though he would never admit it,
that it seemed as good a place as any to protect his personal topography of
some street in a ruined German city.

He
did not take many precautions; lazily, as if it were not very important, he
took a few Spanish classes, said goodbye to his colleagues, and left on a ship
that left from Hamburg, from a place that in his opinion was no longer Germany,
but the monotonous land of the despots.

At
that time the Foundation’s lots, forsaken at the outskirts of a miniscule
village, were completely wild. First he built a house in the village,
deliberately designed to exclude anything that might identify it as the house
of a German, in a marvel of emulation that bore no trace of the pride with
which many foreigners, Germans in particular, more interested in cultivating
fictitious memories of an idealized country, a country that, as it happened,
always ended up looking like Bavaria, settled in Argentine villages rather than
integrate into the native population. He, on the other hand, tried for months
to blend in with them, to be one more of the locals who watched with confusion
the eccentricities of a German with an enormous wild field that he did not sow,
who spent entire days doing little more than watching birds, writing down every
detail in spiral bound notebooks with a tiny pencil that he kept in the left
pocket of his blue work shirt.

First
he had rheas, a flock of twelve that grew to fourteen the following spring, but
that a group of hunters reduced to three in one night. Despite offers, he did
not sell their hide or feathers, but left them where they fell for other birds
to scavenge.

One
year later he learned that a pair of pumas had moved onto his land. He spent
long, hot days stalking them, hoping that they would come to drink from the
pond at the centre of the field, so he could photograph them and eyeball their
measurements. Although the pumas prospered while no one knew of their
existence, they soon left.

One
day he got a letter from the Foundation saying the project was over and he had
to return to Germany. For two nights, summer nights that to him seemed
freezing, he thought about giving it up and staying in the village, about a
solution that would allow him to continue to roam around the land and care for
the animals. One night he wrote a formal letter in a German that was probably
antiquated, a German that was undoubtedly better suited to the past than to the
present, the language of a country that no longer existed, but he never sent
it. The Foundation simply forgot about him. And he, believing himself free for
the first time of all ties with Germany, dedicated himself to drinking in
celebration of his victory.

I
got the chance to meet him in person when he had been celebrating for almost
three years straight. He drank so much wine that I worried I would not be able
to get anything I could use out of him. In the village bar, just before meeting
him, they told me that the German had treasure stashed away in his house, that
Nazi treasure was hidden in his house, but I said nothing. He told me that he
had rescued a collared anteater that some of the locals had found when it was
no bigger than the palm of his hand, he said, extending his white palm over the
table in the bar, and that now it was almost as tall as a man and a little ridiculous,
sticking its long snout everywhere and behaving like a three year old child. He
wanted to send it to a zoo in Germany, in that country that no longer existed
and that for me, and probably for him as well, was little more than a name, but
he was having administrative problems, the kind of inconveniences he would have
avoided had he had the money to bribe every bureaucrat that got in his way, the
way everyone did in Germany. But he did not have the money, or, if he had it,
as they had told me earlier, it was hidden away somewhere in his house, and he
did not intend to use it. One day I got a letter telling me that finally,
somehow, he had solved the problem of the anteater, which was now in a plane on
its way to a zoo where it would be able to reproduce. Although this was happy
news, it meant also a burden for him because he was again alone. I went to
visit him a month later, but the burden had been lifted: a fawn had been left
in his care. The fawn was probably the first to be seen in the region in ten
years; its species was almost extinct, and he crossed it out in the air with a
gesture that was ostentatious but very evocative. He took care of that orphaned
fawn as if it were a child—he fed it, he sheltered it, he cared for it as what
it was: the last gem from a long-exhausted mine.

I
forgot about him for some time, until I heard his name one afternoon. Thieves
had broken into his house one night looking for Nazi treasure and shot him four
times in the stomach. Lying in his own blood, he could see the fawn looking at
him, stupefied, as if somehow the scene he had told me was the last thing he
wanted to remember from Germany was repeating itself, only inverted. With an
abrupt act, his last act, he pushed the fawn away; it started running off into
the field. A fawn is little more than a child. When it turned back to look at
him, to cast a glance at the nationless orphan that had saved it, it did not
notice the rifle, and then man and animal, the two orphans, stopped breathing
at the same time.

Patricio
Pron is an
Argentinian writer and journalist. His work has been translated into several
languages, including English, French, German, and Italian. Granta named him one of its best young contemporary Spanish novelists.

Rob Twiss

Rob
Twiss translates
from French and Spanish into English. He is completing his master’s degree in translation
studies from the University of Ottawa.